[My Christmas] list starts with Republics Ancient and Modern
by Paul A. Rahe. This rather daunting title gives an idea of the
seriousness and the range of the theme, but no hint of its total
fascination. It embraces the whole of European political thought,
from the birth of systems, through Sparta and Athens, with their
later impacts and rejections, then sweeps on to Machiavelli,
Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, enlightened despotism and the philosophes, to the American Revolution and the anatomy of
modern political notions. It is annotated on a Gibbonian scale and
illustrated by the influences of literature, poetry, religious
clashes and wars and by a vast throng of absorbing and complex
figures. . . . This extraordinary book . . . is a great achievement
and will stay as a landmark.

—Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Spectator

Any book of nearly 800 pages of text and more than 400 pages of
notes and apparatus requires extraordinary justification for its
existence. Yet the learning, the scope, the lucid argument, and the
persistent stimulation of Paul A. Rahe’s Republics Ancient and Modern justify both the courage and
investment of the author and the publisher and the long hours one
must spend in its reading. Though I disagree with a fundamental
part of its thesis, there can be no doubt that Rahe has written a
seminal work that will for a long time put students of political
thought in general, and of the ideas of the American founding in
particular, in his debt. In a way that even evokes comparison with
such masterworks of philosophy, history, and social science as
those of Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Baron de Montesquieu,
Rahe brings to our contemplation the complex fabric of republican
political inquiry from Plato to Thomas Jefferson.

—Ralph Ketcham (Syracuse University), William and Mary Quarterly

Weighing in at 15 pounds, the book brings to mind the reviewer of Gone with the Wind, who commented that he had heard of books you couldn’t put down but had never before seen one you couldn’t
pick up. . . . The author is contentious in the good sense of the
word; his voice is authoritative, and “awesome” is the only way to
characterize his grasp of the conversation about politics that has
been running now for close to two-and-a-half millennia. There is
scare a speaker who has escaped his notice.

—Joyce Appleby (UCLA), The American Political Science Review

Impressively researched, extensively documented, broadly conceived,
and clearly written, Rahe’s study raises the scholarly discourse
about the nature of the founding of the American republic to a new
level.

—M. L. Dolan (Northern Michigan University), Choice

A fashionable fantasy: America is the New World; America is kitsch.
America is the embodiment of all that is banal and superficial;
American is a country without a history. . . . Easily worked, this
fantasy. But it comes too easily. The truth is that America is
loaded with history; and a good part of that load is perfectly
familiar to Europeans. This accounts for the bulk of Paul Rahe’s
book. Simply to pick it up is to appreciate the substance of
American history. An inherited burden, a ponderous past. . . . The
founders of America were not whooping Cherokees, errant Vikings or
Italian mariners, but rather grave men of the 18th century who had
been educated in roughly the same way as Samuel Johnson, Edmund
Burke and Maximilian Robespierre. That is, they were schooled in
the Classics, and they set up the American Constitution within the
intellectual precincts of the European Enlightenment. Hence the
substance and the dignity of this new study, which if the title
were still available might properly be called Roots. For it
is an essentially radical enterprise: a retrieval of the
mentalities of the Founding Fathers, an excavation of the basis of
modern America.

—Nigel Spivey (Emmanuel College, Cambridge), The Spectator

“To comprehend modern times well, it is necessary to comprehend
ancient times well; it is necessary to follow each law in the
spirit of all the ages.”—Baron de Montesquieu

Taking de Montesquieu’s words to heart, historian Paul A. Rahe
examines the modern republic from the perspective of its ancient
forebears in a provocative work of comparative politics that
challenges standard interpretation.

In Republics Ancient & Modern, Rahe spans the history of
Western political thought—from classical antiquity to the 18th
century—to determine how ancient republican ideals both influenced
and were transformed by early European and American political
ideologies.

His conclusions are often startling. Rahe confronts the prevailing
view that there is a continuity between Greek republicanism and
modern political thought. “I contend that there was a decisive
break,” he writes, as he documents the repudiation of the classical
tradition by European thinkers from Machiavelli to Locke and
asserts that the American Founding Fathers went even further,
initiating “a new order of the ages” that signaled the final
severance with the ancient past.

Rahe contrasts the illiberal, martial republics of classical
antiquity with the liberal, commercial polities of modern times,
finding each to be institutions grounded on the most fundamental
beliefs of their era. While the Greek pólis was “a moral
community of men,” that subordinated the rights of its citizens to
the interests of the state, the modern republic became a place
where individual rights were of paramount importance, and life,
liberty, and property the responsibility of government to protect.

How did this radical and extreme transformation take place? Largely
through drastic shifts in political ideology, Rahe maintains. He
analyzes the writings of Bacon, Montesquieu, Hobbes, and Locke from
the early modern period; and Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, and
Jefferson from the American to give readers a thorough
understanding of how intellectual discourse transformed republican
politics, paving the way for a fundamental shift in republican
government.

Republics Ancient & Modern
is an ambitious work of political history that rivals J. G. A.
Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment in its sweep and coverage.
It is a comprehensive analysis of republicanism that will fascinate
anyone with an interest in Western politics and political ideology.

—The History Book Club Review

Rahe’s half-a-million-word leviathan is a formidable . . .
achievement, . . . a bibliographical goldmine. . . . [T]he value of
his fluent, literate . . . and polemical text outweighs even that
of its 400 pages of footnotes. . . . Rahe has at least convinced me
that there is less of the ‘ancient’ in early modern political
thinking than those who seek to explain its essence on a ‘civic
humanist’ model would have us believe.

—Paul Cartledge (Clare College, Cambridge), History Today

In this immense . . . book, which represents as much work as many
historians achieve in half a lifetime, Paul A. Rahe argues that
between the ancient (principally Greek) and modern republics, the
purpose and meaning of the state changed fundamentally, while the
concept of virtue, ever elusive and protean, acquired
correspondingly changed—and weaker—values. . . . One of Rahe’s
sustaining aims is to return the classics to their place in
American political self-consciousness. He is never far from a
Machiavellian desire to restore the Republic by confronting it with
its own first principles. But what principles? The task appears
paradoxical, since his argument has demonstrated the crucial
discontinuities. The exercise is intellectually justified—and
certainly made interesting—by the Renaissance rediscovery of
antiquity; and to fulfill his mission, Rahe traces the march of
western thought towards the modern idea of the secular, and
ultimately utilitarian state—from homo politicus to homo faber—(although there is only one reference to Bentham)
across a bridge erected by a long succession of thinkers, notably
Machiavelli, Montaigne, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Harrington,
Spinoza, Vico, Paolo Sarpi, Locke, Montesquieu, Diderot, Adam
Ferguson, Adams Smith and Franklin. There are many more; the book
is rich in references, subtle in discourse. . . . Among Rahe’s many
encounters with other historians the most important, and what
presumably started the whole project, is his dissent from J. G. A.
Pocock in The Machiavellian Moment (1975) and in subsequent
writings. It becomes difficult to sustain Pocock’s view that the
Constitution was ‘a flight from modernity’, a conscious attempt to
return to first principles through the revival of homo politicus. The ‘civic humanism’ attributed to
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Commonwealth men and their
American successors disappears into the mists as ‘by and large a
figment of the scholarly imagination’.

The description of Greek politics was for me the most rewarding
part of the book. The subject has been done many times, yet the
author’s depiction is fresh. Rahe refuses to soft-pedal on those
practices considered repugnant today, and interprets Greek life as
a seamless whole dedicated to rearing public-spirited warriors. He
shows a virile politics that excluded women from public life, and
in Sparta, relegated them to the child-bearing role. But women are
not excluded from Rahe’s account: he ransacks the sparse sources to
convey some sense of their circumstances. Similarly with slavery.
This institution freed citizens from unworthy toil, but in Sparta
programmed cruelty to slaves was part of the education of young
men; Rahe lets the reader feel the human misery that purchased
Spartan virtue.

Education to civic virtue was the central concept of Greek
democracy. Education was not a training in skills and routines, but
a combination of physical culture, musical exercise, and military
training meant to instill solidarity, valour and shame. Rahe is
especially strong on that embarrassment to classical scholars,
homosexual love between youths and their mentors. The homosexual
episode in education was believed to enhance warrior solidarity and
to lift courage in battle. Another unmodern trait of Greek politics
was the low esteem for trade and everything merely mechanical. This
was the obverse of devotion to the only activities considered
worthy of free men—politics, war, and the celebration of both in
poetry and the arts.

—Hiram Caton (Griffith University, Australia), Quadrant

For those who have dared to hope that the obsession with
republicanism as a useful category of analysis had run its course,
the arrival of this four-and-a-half pound volume is an ominous
portent. As intellectually ambitions as J. G. A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment, the work to which it might most
obviously be compared, Republics Ancient and Modern is also
more accessible and engaging than that celebrated book, and wider
ranging. Where Pocock observes the ancient republics through the
distant lens of their early modern interpreters, Paul A. Rahe, a
classicist, describes what those republics were about; where Pocock
treats American republicanism as an epilogue to a story already
concluded, Rahe makes the founding of the American “regime” the
climax of his account. In these shifts in emphasis lie virtues—and
powerful virtues—by which the promises of the so-called republican
synthesis may be redeemed and its vices moderated.

—Jack Rakove (Stanford University), The American Historical Review

This is a work vast in scale, soaring in its scholarly ambition,
and magnificent, if uneven, in its achievement. The author’s
command of the primary sources is staggering in breadth and depth,
deftly orchestrated, and rich with insight. Three hundred pages of
footnotes provide a thorough and vivaciously critical review of the
relevant secondary literature. Guided by a carefully constructed
seventy page index, the reader will find this an invaluable
reference resource on any number of crucial topics in the history
of republicanism. Yet to use the book only as such a resource would
be to miss the challenge of its admittedly “long and labyrinthine”
argument.

The first, and theoretically most fundamental, of the book’s three
parts provides a synoptic account of all that is known about the
actual way of life of the polis, juxtaposed with some of the
modern theorists and statesmen’s comments on that life, in order to
bring vividly to light how radically alien to eighteenth century
aspirations was the ancient citizen’s experience of freedom,
family, property, “music,” god, and war. The discussion culminates
in a marvelously informative account of Sparta, the city which is
most revealing because of its “radical fidelity to the principles
particular to the polis.” We are left with a lively
impression of the fascinating mixture of nobility and inhumanity,
reason and fanaticism, that characterized the polis.

[I]n the second part . . . we are treated to an exceptionally lucid
and informative ferreting out of the fascinating twists and turns
in the development of modern republican doctrines (particularly
helpful is the extensive analysis of Harrington, as the key
republican mediator between Hobbesian and Lockean
constitutionalism). Deploying an avalanche of evidence, . . . Rahe
shows how alien the modern project, in all its diverse versions,
was to the classics as well as the Bible.

Since the third and last part, dealing with the American founders,
covers the most familiar ground, one expects it to be the least
interesting. On the contrary: Rahe elaborates a step by step
interpretation of the evolution of the great debate between
Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians that lends dramatic new significance
to their arguments. He shows how each of the great parties to the
conflict welded together an uneasy but powerful republican
synthesis: predominantly modern, but with subordinate, and
mitigating, ancient principles. Here as throughout, Rahe evinces an
uncanny gift for reenacting debates in such a gripping fashion as
to draw the reader into the most rewarding rethinking and
reexamination.

—Thomas L. Pangle (University of Toronto), Political Theory

Paul Rahe’s book has both an immediate and a more remote purpose.
In the short term, he aims, once and for all, to settle the
scholarly debate over whether America is “republican” or “liberal.”
In the longer view, Rahe rehearses a comprehensive backward look
for an age that has lost confidence in the political philosophy of
modern republicanism. He shows us that America’s Founders’
understanding of political principles is not only intelligible but
superior to the views that prevail today. . . . The parade of
learning is part of his rhetorical strategy. By sheer weight and
exhaustiveness he would intimidate the opposition into agreement or
silence. Rahe primarily addresses the scholarly world, especially
historians and political scientists. He aims to convince them, on
grounds they respect, that the received wisdom on the American
founding is mostly wrong.

—Thomas G. West (University of Dallas), Review of Politics

No one can fail to be impressed by Paul Rahe’s magnificent
contribution to the history of political theory. With almost 800
pages of text and over 400 of notes and elaborate index, it is an
indispensable reference for scholars concerned with classical
political philosophy and its ramifications for the West,
particularly in America. The volume’s three books—”The Ancien
Régime,” “New Modes and Orders” (the longest section), and
“Inventions of Prudence”—represent reflective accounts of ancient
republicanism, the early modern political philosophers (especially
on Locke), and the American novus ordo seclorum,
respectively. An historian by training, Rahe displays an impressive
command of the scholarship in both political philosophy and
political history. It is a rare scholar who would not profit from
this book.